A practical guide for search fund entrepreneurs considering add-on acquisitions
By Dylan Harrocks, Founder of PMI Stack
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Your first acquisition was about buying a business to run. Your second is about building a platform.
Most search fund entrepreneurs don’t think much about technical integration when they acquire their initial company. And honestly, that’s fine – you’re inheriting whatever systems the previous owner used, and your job is to run the business, not redesign its tech stack on day one.
But if you’re considering add-on acquisitions (and roughly 75% of PE-backed buyouts now involve bolt-ons), the decisions you make in your first 18 months will either make those future deals straightforward or turn them into expensive headaches.
This isn’t about becoming a tech expert. It’s about understanding which early choices compound – for better or worse – when you start bolting on additional businesses.
(We’ve put together a more detailed integration playbook for serial acquirers – this is the search fund-specific version.)
The Platform vs. Bolt-On Mindset Shift
When you acquired your first company, you inherited a set of systems. QuickBooks for accounting. Maybe HubSpot or Salesforce for CRM. Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 for email. A scheduling tool. Some spreadsheets that one person maintains.
You probably didn’t choose any of this. You just started using it.
Here’s the shift that matters: the moment you acquire a second company, your first company’s systems become the “platform” that everything else plugs into. That CRM you inherited? It’s now the system you’ll be migrating customer data into. That accounting setup? It needs to accommodate a second set of books.
The question isn’t whether your current systems are perfect. It’s whether they can scale – and whether the way you’re using them will make future integrations easier or harder.
A simple example: Say your platform company uses Salesforce, but the sales team has created dozens of custom fields over the years – some duplicative, some unused, some with inconsistent naming conventions. When you acquire company two, you now need to map their customer data into this messy structure. Every bad decision in the platform multiplies across every add-on.
The inverse is also true. Clean data, clear naming conventions, and documented processes in your platform company make each subsequent integration faster and cheaper.
What to Get Right Before Add-On #1
You don’t need to overhaul everything. But there are a few areas where getting the foundation right pays dividends.
CRM: One Source of Truth for Customers
Your customer database is probably your most valuable asset. Before you acquire a second company, ask: do you have a single, accurate customer list – or duplicates scattered across inconsistent fields? Could a new person understand the data structure if someone left tomorrow?
The goal isn’t perfection. It’s knowing what you have. A CRM with 30% duplicate records will double your integration timeline when you try to merge in a second company’s customer list.
The cleanup tax: If your platform data is messy, you’re paying a “cleanup tax” on every deal. Fix it once, and every future integration gets easier.
Finance: A Chart of Accounts That Can Scale
Most search fund entrepreneurs consolidate financials pretty quickly – your board and investors want to see the numbers in their quarterly updates. But how you set up your chart of accounts matters for future acquisitions.
Here’s a common problem: your acquired company tracks service revenue in 15 line items. Your platform uses 3. When you consolidate, someone has to reconcile these structures – either by simplifying the acquired company’s tracking (losing granularity) or expanding your platform’s chart of accounts (adding complexity). Neither is fun to figure out mid-integration.
A 30-minute conversation with your accountant now about “what if we acquire another company next year” can save significant rework later.
Documentation: The Stuff Nobody Writes Down
Here’s what you’ll discover when you try to integrate your first add-on: half of how your business actually runs isn’t documented anywhere. It lives in people’s heads, in email threads, in “that’s just how Sarah does it.”
You don’t need to document everything. But before you acquire again, you should be able to answer:
- What systems do we use for what?
- Who has admin access to each system?
- What are the key processes, and who owns them?
- Where does critical data live?
Think of this as creating a map of your own business. You’ll need this map to figure out how a second business connects to it.
When You Do Acquire Again: The First 100 Days
Let’s say you’ve found a good add-on target. The deal closes. Now what?
Before You Touch Anything: Discovery
The biggest mistake in post-acquisition integration is moving too fast. You might think you know what you bought – you did due diligence, you saw the systems list, you talked to the management team.
But deal due diligence and integration planning are different exercises. Due diligence happens under time pressure, focused on deal risk. It tells you what systems exist on paper. It doesn’t tell you:
- How people actually use those systems day-to-day
- Which spreadsheets are secretly running critical processes
- Where the data quality problems are hiding
- Who the real power users are (and who will resist change)
Before you start migrating anything, spend time on discovery. Walk the office. Interview department heads. Export sample data and check quality. Find the shadow IT that nobody mentioned during due diligence – the Access database from 2008, the “closet server” in the back room, the critical spreadsheet that one person maintains.
The Closet Server Test: Before your first planning meeting, physically walk the acquired company’s office. Look under desks, in back rooms, in storage areas. If you find a humming box that nobody mentioned, you’ve found shadow infrastructure. Ask what it does. The answer is often “I think it runs the scheduling system.” That’s your cue to dig deeper before you change anything.
The Integration Depth Decision
Not every acquisition needs full integration. You have real choices about how deeply to merge systems:
Full integration: Move everything onto your platform systems. Unified CRM, unified accounting, unified email. Choose this when: The add-on is small (under 20% of your platform’s revenue), offers the same services you do, and has no brand equity worth preserving. Classic tuck-in.
Back-office integration: Consolidate CRM and finance for unified reporting and customer visibility, but keep some operational systems separate if they work well. Choose this when: The add-on has specialized tools that actually work (don’t replace a good scheduling system just for consistency), or serves a distinct customer segment where brand separation makes sense.
Light touch: Just establish financial reporting and basic security. Leave everything else alone for now. Choose this when: You’re testing a new market, the integration costs clearly exceed the benefits, or you might spin this business out later.
A useful filter: does this system touch customers, cash, or compliance? If yes, it probably needs to integrate. If not, it might be fine to leave alone initially.
Data to Secure Early
A few things to grab in the first 30 days, even if you’re not migrating yet:
Customer history that lives in inboxes. If key customer relationships are documented only in someone’s email, that knowledge is at risk. Export it, archive it, or at minimum identify where it lives.
Pricing and margin data in spreadsheets. Critical business data often lives in files that aren’t backed up. Find them.
The “conversion trap.” Files that work perfectly in one system often break when migrated to another. Google Docs that become corrupted when exported to Word. Excel files with macros that don’t survive a platform change. Identify these before you commit to a migration approach.
The 100-Day Framework
A reasonable timeline for a medium-complexity integration:
Days 1-30: Stabilization and discovery. Don’t change anything major. Complete your system inventory, interview key people, assess data quality, identify quick wins that build goodwill.
Days 31-60: Core migrations. Email and identity first (you want control of the security perimeter). Then CRM if you’re consolidating customer data. Establish the financial reporting bridge even if full ERP integration comes later.
Days 61-100: Remaining systems and handoff. Complete remaining migrations, run parallel systems where needed for safety, train users, document what you’ve done.
Add time if data quality is poor. Add time if change management is a major concern. The goal is a realistic plan, not an aggressive timeline you’ll miss.
Common Mistakes
Assuming the seller documented anything. They didn’t. Or if they did, it’s outdated. Plan for discovery work regardless of what you were told during due diligence.
Migrating too fast. The pressure to “just get it done” leads to rushed migrations, data loss, and angry employees. Moving methodically is faster than fixing mistakes.
Underestimating the people side. Integration isn’t just technical. The person who’s been running that spreadsheet for 10 years has opinions about changing systems. The manager who was promised “nothing will change” is now nervous. Resistance usually has reasons – people often understand things about how the business works that you don’t yet.
Making integration a finance-only project. If your integration plan is just about getting the numbers into your reporting, you’re missing the operational complexity. CRM, HR, and operational systems matter too.
The Bottom Line
The key insight: integration thinking shouldn’t start when you acquire your second company. It should start the day you close your first deal.
The systems you inherit, the data quality you tolerate, the documentation you create (or don’t) – these decisions compound. Get the foundation right in year one, and your first add-on becomes straightforward execution. Ignore it, and you’re paying for that neglect on every future deal.
Unlike larger PE firms, you don’t have an integration team waiting in the wings. But you’re close enough to the operations to understand what actually matters. Use that.
Dylan Harrocks is the founder of PMI Stack, which helps serial acquirers with post-merger technical integration. Before PMI Stack, he spent six years running a development agency building CRM and business systems for SMEs.
